Passionate `Cloud Tectonics' Weaves A Celestial Spell At Theaterworks

April 06, 1998|By MALCOLM JOHNSON; Courant Theater Critic

`Cloud Tectonics,'' which opened Friday night at TheaterWorks, is the third work by the young Latino playwright Jose Rivera to be produced in Hartford, and although small in scale, it is the most richly realized production he has received here. Again, as in ``Marisol'' and the recent ``Sueno'' at the Hartford Stage Company, Rivera shows himself to be a theater poet whose head teems with visions of heaven and earth. Yet this transcendent love story, while filled with fantastical ideas, also proceeds with a brilliant logic sometimes not easily perceived in the writer's other works.

His title perhaps requires a bit of explanation. Essentially a geologic term having to to with rock structures, Rivera has lifted it into the sky. The phrase comes near the end of the play when Rivera's protagonist, Anibal de la Luna, speaks of the mysterious Celestina del Sol: ``trying to understand such a life, and why love matters to it, . . . was like trying to understand the anatomy of the wind, or the architecture of silence or cloud tectonics.''

This fragment provides a sense of the elevated quality of Rivera's writing, but he can be earthy, too, even vulgar at times. He has also written a play about physical love that has been staged by Rob Ruggiero with sensuality and sensitivity. Seldom has anything so frankly erotic been seen on a Hartford stage, though there is not a sugestion of obscenity in the love scenes between Anibal and Celestina as played out on a foldaway bed by the earnest and ardent Chris Vasquez and the beautiful, strangely distant Delilah Cotto.

The actors are finely matched, complementing each other as sun (del Sol) and moon (de la Luna) on one of those brief magical moments when both can be seen in the sky. Vasquez gives Anibal a serious, yet sometimes humorous, salt-of-the- earth quality. His Anibal is a baggage handler, skeptical about the Hollywood ambitions of his girlfriend, Debbie, who is slaving for Disney. Cotto makes Celestina at once ethereal and wonderfully human, with her mirthful, musical, finely sustained laugh. Her character is a wayfaring stranger, seemingly mad, eternally searching.

Anibal and Celestina come together in Ruggiero's haunting staged opening. Headlights pick out a drenched woman, hitchhiking in the darkness and rain of Los Angeles. At last Anibal rescues her. In the half light, separated by the stage, they talk, as if side by side in a car seat. Celestina is very pregnant, and terribly lost, having left her ride, a trucker who touched her leg. Anibal decides to take her home, to dry her out. John Lasiter's eloquent lighting warms from chilling blues.

Back in the Mission-accented apartment designed by Michael Schweikardt, Celestina turns out to be a weird one. She has no sense of time, it seems, and talks of having been raped by an older man for whom she is now searching. She claims she has been pregnant for two years. But as embodied by Cotto, a slender woman with an almond-shaped visage crowned by a black fall of hair, she is undeniably seductive. Nelson, Anibal's long lost younger brother on a brief leave from desert training in Death Valley, is immediately taken with her and pledges to marry her some day and to adopt the baby. As played by lean, athletic Joseph D. Martinez, Little Brother is something of a wild man, impetuous and highly sexed.

But as the rain pours down eternally -- Los Angeles's biggest storm ever is shown splashing on Anibal's windows -- Nelson announces he must leave. Passion builds between Celestina and Anibal, only to be interrupted. Now ``Cloud Tectonics'' evolves into a sort of mystery play about time and space, topped by a bit of science fiction played out by a refreshed Cotto and a worn, bent Vasquez.

Rivera's play, first done three seasons back at the new play festival at the Actors Theater of Louisville, with subsequent productions at La Jolla Playhouse and Playwrights Horizons in New York, is a short, intermissionless piece, but could benefit from a bit more tightening. In the end, Rivera tells us too much, and his vision of the future of L.A. is a bit too jokey. For most of its time on the TheaterWorks stage, however, ``Cloud Tectonics'' weaves a celestial spell.

CLOUD TECTONICS, written by Jose' Rivera; directed by Rob Ruggiero; scenery designed by Michael Schweikardt; costumes designed by Margaret Charbonneau; lighting designed by John Lasiter; sound design and original music by Marty Fegy; technical director, David Durbin; stage manager, Peter Durgin. Presented by TheaterWorks, Steve Campo, executive and artistic director.